Real estate as a career is an excellent choice, there are flexible schedules and potential for significant revenue, and you get to be your own boss.
Also, getting started is one of the easiest in any industry; take a couple of real estate courses, pass a licensing exam, sign up for a brokerage, pay some dues and fees, and voila! You’re a real estate agent.
The reality is that for many agents, being their own boss isn’t the blessing it seems. As work piles up, keeping up with growing your business and maintaining a brand is simply too much for most people.
The reality is that people can feel overwhelmed by finding leads, contacting them, scheduling, negotiating, and writing contracts. At the same time, marketing for future business is a lot to tackle without support systems in place. All the necessary foundations are needed to find success in real estate.
The problem for most new agents is that the ease of getting started in real estate creates a false expectation that the industry is easy.
Once you have your license, how you succeed or fail falls entirely on your shoulders.
Unfortunately, that is the reason so many fail in the business.
In fact, over 85% of all agents will be in another industry within 5-years. So what separates the majority of agents from successful ones?
There are 7 tips for you to know if you want to be a successful real estate agent.
1. Get A Coach And Mentor
Starting out, you don’t know many things about your capabilities or how to succeed in the business. Getting a mentor that can help guide you, teach you the things you need to know and show you systems to accelerate your business will give you a significant boost at the start of your career.
A mentor, ideally, is someone from your office whom you get along with and have similar goals. You may need to do some work for free with your mentor, but the lessons and processes they teach you will help you exponentially as you build your brand.
Think about a mentorship similar to the old apprenticeships that were prevalent for the trades in the past. A blacksmith had to learn at the hands of a master before they were able to blacksmith on their own. Likewise, we expect doctors to learn through a residency at the hands of experts, and you should take the same approach as a new agent.
From negotiating to writing contracts, scheduling inspections, marketing, and closing deals, your mentor has systems in place that they use to stay front-of-mind and to facilitate the speed and efficiency of the business they built.
A coach, on the other hand, is someone you pay for their services to guide you, help find more efficient ways for your business to operate and help you create a system for accountability to your goals. They will help you see what’s important, what isn’t, and how to manage your time effectively.
A good real estate coach is someone who has a proven track record both in the industry as an agent themselves and as someone who’s helped other agents find success.
While a mentor looks at the day-to-day, a coach takes a more detached, distant view of your operations and finds inefficiencies in them that your coach can help you perform better.
A real estate coach will ask you to set some goals and show you the steps necessary to achieve those goals, as well as put into place smaller, easier-to-achieve goals that are the building blocks to success.
Building a foundation of systems and procedures for every aspect of your business is part of the price of being successful.
Some agents prefer mentors. Some prefer coaches.
Either way, whether you choose to go with a mentor, coach, or both, having experienced professionals who are experts to help you learn and take a detached view of your goals and ambitions will help propel you toward a successful career in real estate.
2. Set Goals
The single most motivating factor in real estate comes from your goals. However, you will lose motivation quickly if you make lofty, unrealistic goals.
Instead, if you establish some more significant goals, working with a coach or mentor to deconstruct what it will take to achieve those goals will build you a “staircase” to climb and reach.
Goal setting is important because all your systems stem from the creation of those goals.
Let me put it differently.
A pilot knows the departure and arrival airport. They have a checklist for pre-flight, checking the engine, fuel, and other instruments, to prepare for the flight. Goal-setting timelines, departure times, and arrivals are detailed, including the passenger and cargo manifest. This phase is the goal-setting phase, with the amount of fuel and considerations, from departure time to arrival.
Before they take off, they need to check in with flight control and ensure the itinerary is correct and the flight path is clear.
Once they get permission, they can proceed to the tarmac and taxi to take off. In this example, the tower (flight control) is the equivalent of a coach or mentor. They double-check and validate the pilot’s timeline and goals and tweak that schedule based on outside factors (other planes) that may interfere with or derail the pilot’s plans.
As the pilot accelerates and gains lift-off, they must monitor the instruments and the skies ahead for any potential problems or debris. This phase is more maintenance than anything, but that’s because the pilot’s procedures and systems are in place and operating.
Setting a macro goal, one that is a year, two years, or more, is fine, but how will you accomplish those goals and objectives? Sometimes you’re looking at the goal from too emotional of a perspective, which is why an outside expert looking at your goals and guiding you to building the foundational steps needed to achieve them is highly recommended.
When you set goals, having small accomplishments along the way act as an additional motivator. There is substantial research about the psychology of small accomplishments and motivation, which state that by achieving small accomplishments, your brain releases dopamine, a neurochemical that stimulates and boosts moods, adding incentive to accomplish the next task.
Here’s the point; to achieve success in real estate, you need to set some long-term goals and create short-term mini-successes to help keep you on track and motivated.
Setting goals, making yourself accountable for achieving them, and learning to build the systems needed to accelerate those accomplishments are what it will take to be successful as a new agent.
However, all the goals and systems in the world won’t mean anything if you don’t have relationships with other people in order to succeed.
3. Build Relationships
Real estate is about relationships. It could be relationships within your office, with a mentor, other agents, and with transaction coordinators, title reps, finance, and more.
The most important relationships you make are the ones you can move from casual acquaintances to your sphere of influence.
The first thing is to find creative ways to meet new people and build a rapport with them without it being transactional. By definition, transactional relationships are based on how both parties expect to benefit.
Instead, consider each person you meet to be a potential prospect down the road. Treat them as potential friends, not a client. Make the interaction positive, fun, and informal, and only casually find a way to introduce that you’re a real estate agent into the conversation.
If you’re looking for ways to meet new people, consider:
- Networking events
- Holding a happy hour Q&A for prospects
- Creating engaging social media posts and interact
- Email drip campaigns
- Talking with your neighbors
- Meeting with regulars at a favorite cafe, restaurant, or bar
The key is to make yourself known to as many people as possible and learn to convert these casual acquaintances into part of your sphere of influence.
Your sphere of influence is those people who know you, trust you, and seek out information about the market and other real estate needs.
There are two stages of your sphere of influence. The first is the warm sphere. These are the people that know you – friends, parents, family, other colleagues, and so on. On average, you should be in touch with your warm sphere every month in some way, either by social media or in person. Therefore, reaching out to your warm sphere is the stage that will most likely be responsible for your first few transactions.
The second type is the cold sphere. These people don’t know you, but you met with the intent of helping them in real estate. These may be the ones you meet while standing in line at Starbucks, at the store, or through cold emails and calls.
This area is the hardest and requires the most work to nurture, but it also can be the one area generating the most amount of future business for you. In order to transition a person from cold to warm is simply meeting their needs, communicating in terms that generate trust, and exceeding their expectations.
Real estate is about relationships, so finding ways to connect with warm leads and people you don’t know (cold leads) is crucial to building trust in you as an agent. The best way to build trust is to focus on the client's needs, not the real estate transaction.
In other words, focusing on providing superior service to your sphere and not putting an emphasis on the sale of a home goes a long way to building and nurturing trust in your services.
4. Create Systems
As you become more goal-oriented, the next step is to create a system or systems that help you become more efficient in all your operations, from contracts and lead generation to marketing and more.
Of course, you want to borrow from your mentor systems that boost their productivity, and your coach can help you set up systems and processes that work best with your goals and align with your philosophies.
Systems are any type of activity that boosts productivity, increases your business, and preferably can be automated–making them easy to operate without your constant involvement.
Your systems should include:
- Scheduling tasks and objectives for the day, week, month
- Where and when to prospect your farm
- How to generate leads–free versus paid
- Scheduling appointments–virtual, on the phone, in person
- Converting leads to clients
- Retargeting and following up with past leads
Systems can provide you with an outline for your work day, making work more effective and work/life balance easier to achieve.
The benefit of systems is that it creates structure and metrics that you can analyze for effectiveness. But, in general, you want to have some room for flexibility, so don’t schedule every minute of your day with your systematic approach.
Build into your schedules and your systems times to meet with clients, have work/life balance, or whatever you need to accomplish that may have taken more time than you thought.
Keep in mind that the best systems are the ones you can automate or delegate to an aide. You want to focus your energy on growing your business by learning how to market your brand better.
5. Learn To Market Your Brand
Your real estate business is just part of what identifies you as your brand. Learning to embrace “branding” means that you’re able to build a strong, recognizable, positive perception of your company.
As you begin your real estate career, think about how you want to be perceived by others and build the reputation you want. Focus on your actions and how they may be perceived and received, and incorporate that into every interaction and social media post you can.
Ideally, you’ll find a strategy that works best for you and can utilize multiple channels, from interpersonal email to social media.
When you set out to market your brand, you want to keep in mind that you’ll eventually want (and need) to automate this strategy, so here are three things to keep in mind;
- Hit on all your bases, from prospects to leads to clients
- Make the connection and contact personalized
- Don’t recreate the wheel–stick to what works for you and with other agents.
Your marketing aims to expand your sphere of influence, stay in front of mind to anybody in your sphere, and be readily available to assist any of your prospects, leads, and clients.
By effectively marketing your brand and positioning yourself as an agent that provides superior service, you’re making yourself available to help clients and prospects.
6. Be Available
Being available doesn't mean lowering your boundaries and being on-call 24/7, but it does mean that being accessible during business hours is a crucial component of building a brand reputation.
You may be working with 5 clients and have 3 prospects and 3 leads simultaneously. How you manage and juggle those interactions go a long way toward building a reputation and potentially making some deals.
You may miss some calls, be sure to reach out and connect with those missed calls. You may not get an email immediately but respond as soon as possible. Whatever the reason you missed connecting, being available means that you’ll get back to them, assisting them either by answering their questions right away or scheduling an appointment time to meet.
Most importantly, it’s crucial to ask your clients their preferred method of communication. Some prefer in-person, some may like a phone call, others by text or email. Clients notice the little things, such as understanding their best practices and meeting them on their terms. It’s a personal touch that creates a positive experience for your clients and helps propel them to make recommendations to their sphere.
Learning how each client and prospect wants to communicate can also make it easier for you to maintain boundaries and keep to expectations. These traits enhance trust and create a veneer of expertise.
If you need to see your doctor, you have two options. Either schedule during their office hours or go to urgent care or emergency room. Not being able to see your primary care physician at 2 a.m. doesn’t change your perception. You understand that they are professional and keep professional boundaries.
Being available and becoming a perceived expert are the last two stages of developing a foundation to be a successful real estate agent.
7. Become An Expert
You’ve set your goals, met with experts to assist you, created systems and marketing strategies, and then you need to go back and learn about the market.
That’s right, to become successful as a real estate agent, you need to continue learning about the local market as well as trends that may impact the real estate market. In addition, you need to know as much as possible to be perceived as the go-to expert for your prospects, leads, and clients.
Becoming a recognized expert is crucial with the amount of information available online these days. With the ease that people can look things up online, they’re less prone to utilize the services of an agent or investors. The main difference between what information is available online and what you, as an agent, can provide is interpersonal and expertise.
Staying up to date on the latest trends and news in the industry provides you with another way to be perceived as the go-to expert.
With so much of real estate reliant on references and warm leads (sphere), being the go-to expert allows your sphere and previous clients to confidently recommend your services to their friends and family.
But, conversely, the power of a good reference gives instant credibility to cold leads.
Becoming an expert is part of how you can stand out from the other agents in your area. Posting helpful tips on social media, home renovations, and curb appeal to increase value and highlight current market trends are all ways to establish a reputation as an expert.
Real estate is an industry that has a low bar for entry. Taking a couple of classes, passing an exam, paying some dues, and signing up with a broker is about all it takes for the most part.
The classes and brokers don’t tell new agents how to succeed, which, coupled with the ease of becoming an agent, is why most real estate agents fail within the first couple of years.
To be successful as an agent takes strategies, systems, accountability, and know-how that you may be able to figure out on your own, or you can choose to learn from others with a track record of success.
Like all businesses, success is part luck and a whole lot of planning and executing good strategies. Success as a real estate agent requires much more than the bare minimum, which is why finding a mentor or real estate coach is highly recommended when you start.
To learn more strategies for success, join me at my next three-day event.
