At some point in your life, you have probably heard some version of this quote. “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” Earl Philip Stanhope wrote these words in a letter to his son. And boy oh boy have they become a staple in parenting all across America, right?!
In homes throughout the United States, when it’s time to do a household chore or homework, there stands a parent encouraging their child to do the work to the best of their ability. And all around the country, those words are followed by eye-rolling and groans.
Sounds about right.
Now, to be fair, there are times when we just want to get it done. Just get the bed made. Just walk the dog. And sometimes that comes back to bite you because you’ll pay the price for not doing it the way you know it should be done. (If you’ve ever tried skimping on your dog’s walk, you know exactly what I’m talking about.)
When you decided to become a real estate agent, you pictured yourself being successful right? You probably imagined yourself selling house after house and earning a serious income. You may have even mentally planned vacations or bought yourself a new car.
When you don’t service your clients well, your business will end up failing. If you’re not going to do it to the best of your ability, you will be wasting your time and you won’t be serving your client’s needs. The truth is that when you decide to become a real estate agent, you need to do it well for your sake and your client’s sake.
Your real estate career is dependent on your ability to do it well. So, I have some tips to help you be a great agent!
16 Tips for Real Estate Agents
1. To Make Big Money, Follow the Big Money
When you want to bring in large commissions, you have to be utterly realistic about the area you work in. You must work in a more affluent area in order to be on the buying and selling side of homes that will give you the most lucrative commissions.
Choosing to focus your career in a more affluent area is no riskier than choosing a less affluent area. Wealthy people buy and sell their houses just as often as middle-income people. If you do the math on the commissions for a $2,500,000 home, it’s a whole lot more than on a $250,000 home.
Now, this is not a hard and fast rule across the board. There are exceptions. But those exceptions are few and far between. The chances of you making millions are much higher if you focus on luxury homes.
2. A Well-Planned Marketing Strategy Is Crucial
Remember this: You are your brand. The way you present yourself to the world has an impact on your real estate career. That is just one of the many reasons why marketing is a must. As you develop your personal brand, you need to put yourself out there.
This is not something you want to wait to do until you have years of experience under your belt. When you use branding and marketing with a well-planned strategy, you’ll have systems in place to reach people you can find through direct word of mouth. Think of it like the internet’s word-of-mouth system.
Start telling people who you are, what you’re all about, and what you will do for them. And do it now. You are building your reputation with people who don’t even know they need you … yet. If your name and your face become familiar to them, guess who they’ll think of when it comes time to need the services of a real estate agent?!
(If you’re not sure how to do this, please reach out! There are so many great resources.)
3. Follow Those Leads
There is a line in the movie Trolls, “No troll left behind!” (Even if you’re not a fan of cartoons, the 80s music alone makes it worth the watch!) Think of leads like that. No leads left behind!
Seriously. Getting new leads is like panning for gold. Every little thing matters. You don’t ignore the smallest speck of gold, and you don’t ignore a lead. In the same way that a miner had to work a ton before striking it rich, chances are you’ll have to work quite a few hours before your lead is actually ready to be converted into a client ready to pull the trigger.
You have to be persistent and patient at the same time. This is a hurry-up-and-wait game. In other words, jump on those leads right away, and then have the patience to wait until they are ready to move forward. Pushing them will more than likely result in pushing them away.
You must develop a strategy for nurturing every lead. Use your CRM to continue to develop those leads into relationships. You don’t have to be the most amazing lead nurturer on the planet. You just need to do a better job than the other guys. Patience converts leads.
Waiting is winning.
4. Get Your CRM Ready NOW
Technology is your friend in this business. And an excellent customer relationship management (CRM) tool is something you absolutely cannot do without. If you don’t want to manually enter two hundred names and numbers into your phone for a mass text, invest in a CRM. If you want a tool that will send hundreds of text messages out for you, invest in a CRM.
Your CRM is not an opportunity for you to save your pennies and try some sort of makeshift combination of apps to do the work for you. Duct-taping your business together with various apps will not take the place of a good CRM that you’ve been loading contacts into.
Do your research. Find a CRM with a good reputation that is known for consistent top-quality performance. Once you’ve chosen a CRM, start using it immediately. Do not wait to start utilizing your new CRM. It will help streamline your business.
5. Prioritize Your Communication Skills
You cannot be an excellent real estate agent without excellent communication skills. You must learn the art of communication and then perfect it. Be an active listener and make sure your clients, vendors, and other professional contacts are kept up-to-date on all of your mutual projects.
When you begin working with a new client, you need to pay close attention to what they are saying with their words and with their body language and facial expressions. The house buying and selling process stirs up all sorts of feelings. It is a huge transition for most people.
Clients will be more apt to work with you and recommend you to other people if they feel as though you are a well-rounded communicator … from keeping them in the loop through every detail of the process to truly listening and paying attention to all of their needs and concerns.
6. Make Your Clients an Ongoing Priority
After your client has signed on the dotted line, it is important that you stay in touch with them. You should be building a relationship with them as you work together. If it is a good relationship, then you want it to be built to last for the long haul.
Stay in touch with your clients! You do not know what the future holds. Your clients can bring you more business for years to come. So, treat them well.
7. Put Social Media to Work for You
If you are trying to grow your business while avoiding social media, what I’m about to say may seem harsh. You need to get over it. I’m not saying you have to do your own social media, you could choose to hire someone to do it for you. Hiring a professional is actually a great idea.
However you choose to do it, you need to have a thriving social media presence. Social media can be an excellent resource for building your brand, increasing brand awareness, finding leads, letting people know how your business is going, and bringing in new clients.
Think about it. Would you rather exhaust all of your personal relationships with repeated emails and texts, or use the power of social media to communicate, allowing all of your followers the opportunity to share your posts?
8. Don’t Do Your Own Taxes or Bookkeeping
Hopefully, you haven’t already learned your lesson on this. It won’t be a fun lesson to learn. This isn’t as simple as making a mistake that costs you a few hundred dollars. It is quite possible that you are losing the money you could have been making.
And more importantly, unless you are well-versed in all of the tax laws and other rules, you could find yourself breaking laws. How fun would it be to get audited and learn that doing your own taxes was a really bad idea?!
There are teams of people out there who specialize in helping real estate agents. It is a smart idea for you to hire one of those teams to handle your finances. It’s one less thing on your plate and one less thing weighing on your mind every April 15!
9. You Need a Really Good Website
A website is an investment in your real estate career. Don’t think of it as optional, think of it as a must. Take a look online at the best agents. You’ll find that they all have their own websites.
Your website is a place for you to shine and define. Although that just sounded like a hair commercial, it isn’t. You can use your website to show your best features and shine, while also defining for people exactly who you are and what you’re about. Shine and define.
You should also set your website up to funnel in leads and convert them. If you don’t know what a funnel is, you want to find out. A funnel is a fantastic way to bring in fresh leads to your website. And if you’re super smart, you’ll have a website with an integrated CRM.
10. Partner Up
Have you ever heard the quote “No man is an island, entire of itself” by John Donne? Your real estate career is not meant to be done in solitude. You need partners. You need to build and maintain partnerships.
Without the right partnerships, you will struggle to succeed. You want to build relationships with bankers, other agents, cleaning crews, drywall teams, plumbers, movers, painters, interior designers, lawn maintenance, landscapers, and carpet cleaners.
Your partnerships are symbiotic. You both have something that the other needs. And you can bring each other business on a regular basis.
11. Host Open Houses
There is something to be said for a real live walkthrough, as opposed to just seeing pictures online. When people visit homes, they can get a real feel for what it could be like to live there.
You never know who will show up at an open house. It’s a great way for new people to find out who you are and that you would be great to work with.
Think of each open house as a testing ground. You can see what people like and what they don’t, what works, and what completely flops.
12. Automate and Outsource
Do not make your life harder than it needs to be. If you are really not good at something, outsource it. If you don’t have time to do something, automate it. Every single “t” must be crossed and every “i” must be dotted.
It can be incredibly difficult to keep up with everything when you’re doing all of the work yourself. You’ll find things falling through the cracks. You’ll find yourself forgetting things. But when it comes to real estate, you have options to automate and outsource that will make your life much easier.
This is one more reason to keep up with technology! And guess what? If you stink at keeping up with technology, then hire somebody to keep up with it for you! Hire somebody to do the research and you can be the person who has the final say. It’s your business.
The right software can nurture leads for you. The right website tools can bring in leads. As you can see, automating your business will allow your business to work for you even when you’re running an open house or relaxing at the beach.
13. Mindset Matters
Your mindset matters. It matters when things seem to be sinking when they appear to stand still, and when they are going well. There is one common thread that can be found in every successful person—it’s especially true for winning real estate agents—and that is the unshakable presence of a growth mindset.
While the term “growth mindset” may seem like just another overly marketed term, it’s not. And it isn’t about being all sunshiney and spreading sparkles and glitter over your life. A growth mindset is not something that you’re just born with, it’s something that you work on.
That is really great news. You can develop a growth mindset at any age or stage of your life. The type of mental fortitude you need to succeed can be achieved by choosing to reach daily goals, listening to podcasts, or reading books centered around the mindset you want to have, etc. The point is, even if a growth mindset doesn’t come naturally to you, you can develop it.
14. A Personal Holiday Pop Up
You might think that “pop-up” can only apply to those really fun holiday pop-up bars. But this is completely different. This pop-up is all about you reaching out to your clients during the holidays. It’s one more way for you to let them know that you are thankful for them, while also keeping your name at the forefront of their minds when it comes to the best real estate agent they know!
This looks like delivering the same gift to a group of your top clients. You can get pretty creative with this one. Maybe you could deliver a heart-shaped box filled with truffles and a note that says, “I love having you as my client!” (Obviously, you can come up with something more clever than that.)
15. Keep Learning
Real estate is always evolving and you need to grow and evolve with it to be a true expert in your field. If you want to serve your clients well, then you need to make sure you have as much knowledge under your belt as possible.
Take continuing education courses, keep up with all of the trends in your market, learn everything you can about your niche, grow in your understanding of the building process, pay attention to the latest decor trends, and make sure you have the most current knowledge of all the new options for loans.
The more you know, the more of an asset you will be to your client and the more you will stand out for the people who won’t put in the time to learn.
16. Self-Care Is Smart, Not Selfish
There are a lot of opinions out there about self-care. People tell you that drinking wine, getting a manicure, or having a massage is how you do self-care. In some cases, those are a way to care for yourself. However, there is much more to self-care than that.
Self-care is a way to recharge when your internal battery has been drained. In light of that, caring for yourself means knowing what you need mentally, emotionally, and physically to recharge.
That’s It …
There you have it. Sixteen tips to help you make the most out of your real estate career. You do not have to go into real estate blindly. There are resources at your fingertips to help you serve your clients and succeed!
