Building a successful real estate business means more than having a real estate license. More than creating a prospect list and getting a dozen or so sales a year. Sure, you can get by, but you want to take your career to the next level. Attaining success depends on how well you understand the ins and outs of the real estate market, your experiences working with buyers and sellers, building the right team, and ultimately your individual commitment to your own success.
If you desire to be more successful as a real estate professional–and transition from agent to CEO or rainmaker, you can work towards being an expert in the industry. Being an expert means constantly working on your business strategies regardless of how long you’ve been in real estate. Here are a few tips to help you take your real estate career to the next level.
Best Practices for Professional Growth
1. Learn How To Ask Great Questions
Asking questions allows you to improve your sales strategies and understand the market and how to benefit from both. It helps you to understand your buyers or sellers better. It is also important to ask questions about yourself. Lessons are learned when you take the time to reflect. What questions should you be asking yourself? What do you need to learn? What mentors do you need to find?
Your ability to develop a culture of asking questions should be progressive; this means being more intentional in learning how to listen and ask questions at all times. Asking great questions makes you a better business leader for yourself and your team members.
2. Listen to Team Members and Clients
Everyone has something to offer. Listening to what your team says is really important. Listening to your staff helps welcome innovation, creativity, and insight and ultimately makes people feel valuable.
Others can also benefit from market knowledge and develop new skills that allow growth opportunities. Beyond your team members, listening to consumers is also vital. They are the reason you can build your business. Where did you win? What expectations did your clients have that you did not meet? How can we get better? Feedback from your clients will help you navigate the challenges you will have as you scale your real estate business and go from agent to CEO or rainmaker.
3. Build Relationships
Building and sustaining relationships in the real estate industry is a core foundation for success. It's about building relationships with prospective buyers or sellers and your team. Really understanding their needs and how you can solve for them will make all the difference in your success. Customers and team members love to be heard, treated right, and want to know, like, and trust you.
Focus on providing value. Be purposeful about developing relationships with people that add value to your life and you to theirs.
In addition, what relationships are not in your life that you need to go create? Make a list of new people you want to develop a relationship with by the end of the year, and go make it happen!
Challenges are Real
Working With Different Personalities
One of the most challenging tasks for a leader is working with different personalities because everyone's needs are different. It has been said that this industry would be simple if you didn't have to work with other people! The reality is that you do need to work with other people—clients, team members, other agents, etc. The most successful people in this industry are often the best at working with different personality types. You need to apply techniques that will help you effectively work with everyone. Knowing how to address different personalities will help maximize their productivity. Focus on education—more on education below.
You can make mistakes, say the wrong things or even carry out specific actions that are not right as a leader. It's essential to learn from such mistakes and figure out how best to approach the situation when it arises again. Be conscious of this every day.
You can desire to be more successful in real estate, make more money, and build more valuable connections, but if your team is not on the same page, then don’t expect stellar results. You can't want it more than they do. Help your team see past the temporary benefits. Help them see the big picture and how they fit in. Big-picture leadership will foster team ownership and more accountability.
Helping Your Team Means Helping Your Business
Practices you can adopt to help you in your day-to-day communication with prospective clients and team members;
1. Develop the Habit of Learning
It's vital to read as a leader and become a career-long learner. Asides from reading about the market industry, read books on leadership, management, and how to build human relationships.
Learning will help you to understand people's beliefs, opinions, vulnerability, and why they act the way they do. Don’t have the time to read? You can also listen to audiobooks to consume the same information.
2. Get a Coach
You can play the role of coach to your team, but even better, hire a coach for yourself. A Coach should act like a business partner for you and help you stay on track, point out your blind spots, and ultimately help you hit your goals. Further, a coach will help you through the leadership struggles of creating a team. Why go through this process alone?
Hiring a Coach for yourself will also help you become a better coach for your team members. When coaching team members, you must be okay with what they want and not necessarily what you want for them. The focus is to help them accomplish their goals and have fun doing it along the way.
3. Local market expertise
Rather than worrying over the latest industry news, focus your team on building specific market trends and conditions knowledge. Becoming the local economist of choice for the people in your database will pay huge dividends over time. After all, if you need to learn more about the stock market, who would you call? You want to be the person on the top of your database's mind by showing throughout the year that you know your stuff!
And Finally, the Opportunities
There are several great opportunities in the real estate industry. The COVID pandemic caused changes to the market. Interest rates dropped, and people were selling homes faster. But this will not last forever. Look around, ask around and seek out opportunities like FSBOs or networking with agents leaving the industry (and getting their prospect list). There will be people exiting the business, but those who remain will be competitive and focused on sharpening their skills to become higher producing agents are big opportunities.
Bottomline
Success is simple but not easy. Being willing to do the necessary work and manage your time purposefully should be reflected on and measured each week. Be more intentional in impacting someone's life daily. Genuinely build relationships with clients and your team. This is an incredible industry that can have enormous rewards for those that stay consistent, focus on education, and succeed through others.
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