Are you in your first 30 days as a real estate agent? You’ve probably just completed real estate school, passed the exam and gotten licensed in your state. The real estate industry is quite an attractive field to build your career in. Other than the liberty to choose your work hours and schedule, other perks include unlimited income potential and ample opportunities to build your network.
However, all is not rosy as your favorite online influencers might portray it. Your first year is often filled with rough patches where you might feel stuck with no idea on what to do next. Unfortunately, real estate school doesn’t prepare you for your career as a real estate agent. You barely get hands-on experience in the real estate world.
For this reason, many new real estate agents get overwhelmed in their first year and quit. Unsurprisingly, statistics show that 80% of new real estate agents quit within their first year. However, your first 30 days in the field can set a good precedence for the rest of the year. Here’s what you should prioritize if you want to survive the murky waters.
- Move Fast In Your First 30 Days As a Real Estate Agent
Slow speed in the real estate business will kill your career. In most cases, real estate agents who are just starting may not have enough savings to last them a whole year. If you don’t move fast in such a case, you’ll be out of the door before you even have a chance to build a solid foundation for your business.
This is what happens to a majority of real estate agents. They try to get their feet wet in the field, give their all, but their careers fail to take off fast enough, and they run out of money before they ever find success. Their careers don’t last because they take to long to figure things out and they do not earn income fast enough.
The first thing you need to do as a real estate agent is to build your skills. Your skills will form the foundation on which you’ll build your entire career. Part of the reasons why most real estate agents fail is because they don’t have a set of high-value skills. If you want to launch your career fast, you need to develop a robust skill set.
To build a robust foundation, you need to focus on and take considerable time in studying. Even real estate veterans know that there’s always room for improvement. Here are three skills you can learn to become the best in the game:
- The art of communication: Communication is one of the core pillars of successful real estate business. No client wants to work with an agent who’s too busy to reply to them. You should learn the art of being persuasive and demonstrating value to your clients .
- Email marketing: Automation has changed the email marketing scene. You can now add all your clients to an email campaign and keep them engaged without investing a ton of time. Learning and polishing your skills in email marketing will give you a competitive edge over other agents.
- Budgeting: Many new real estate agents focus so much on the commission checks and forget to plan how they spend the money, yet this could be the most significant factors in why agents fail. Money issues are quite sensitive when running a business. You need to learn how to create a budget and stick to it. You can always adjust it as your financial situation changes.
Key things to remember in your first 30 days as a real estate agent.
Remember you’re competing with some of the best agents, some who’ve been around for decades. If you fail to become the best, their experience will overshadow your career, and you will have a hard time gaining new clients.
In addition, you need to commit 100% to your career. The real estate business requires you to burn the boats. Many agents treat it as a side job and hang on to their previous jobs when starting out. In my experience this distracts them from committing fully to the business.
We get it; leaving everything behind to start afresh in a new career is scary and a substantial financial risk. However, you need to realize that you’ll be giving yourself excuses if you don’t commit fully. This will hold you back from doing the hard things you have to go through to build a successful career in real estate.
For example, if you maintain a second job, you might not pick up the phone and make the number of calls you need to make every day. You simply don’t have to. You know that it doesn’t matter even if you fail to close a sale this month because you already have another income source covering your expenses.
You need to commit 100% to grow your business and become the best at what you do. Striving to be the best in your career gives you a good start.
Note that you will not become the best overnight. Seasoned agents who’ve been in the game for over a decade always learn new things about the industry. You need to develop the right mindset to keep growing. Tell yourself that you want to be the best in the business, not average, because that doesn’t make money.
- Take Action & Do the Work
So many real estate agents get into this business thinking it’s going to be glamorous. They believe they’ll just get into it and start making boatloads of money almost instantaneously. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
You need to understand that you have to take massive action once you get into the game. If you don’t do the work, nothing will happen, and you’re going to fail.
You also have to realize that with massive action comes massive prospecting. Prospecting is the number one income generator for real estate agents.
What is prospecting, and how do you do it?
Prospecting primarily involves making outbound calls to people you know and don’t know and asking for new business. If they’re interested, you work toward gaining them as a new client and help them with the transaction. Successful real estate agents pick up the phone and make calls instead of waiting for the phone to ring.
Many new real estate agents hate the idea of picking their phones and calling people to pitch their business. Others have been conditioned to think that cold calling is too complicated and is bound to fail. However, you need to realize that prospecting could be the most profitable thing to your business if done right.
You could participate in two types of prospecting; active and passive prospecting.
- Active Prospecting: This type of prospecting requires you to put active effort into your outreach. It involves activities such as cold calling, door-knocking and attending industry and networking events.
- Passive Marketing: This type of outreach doesn’t necessarily need you to be around or your input. It only needs the initial setup and can run on its own. It includes running Facebook ads and sending email newsletters.
What is better Prospecting or Marketing?
Neither of these types of prospecting is better than the other. They can, in fact, complement each other when used collaboratively. You can implement them both in your prospecting strategy. Just be aware active prospecting will always be most cost effective and is probably best to focus on as a new agent starting out.
You need to dedicate at least two or three prospecting hours every day if you want to succeed. If you fail to commit to and follow a defined prospecting schedule, you’ll experience what we’d like to call a real estate rollercoaster.
This when your income fails to be consistent. It comes up for one month and goes down the next. This inconsistency causes many agents to quit even if they’re making some money because it causes a lot of anxiety.
For example, if you’ve just gotten into the business, you may sell two or three homes in one month and sell none in the next. This will drain all the profit earned in the fruitful month because you’ll make $8,000 but $0 in the next two or three months. You’ll basically be spinning your wheels. So many agents get caught up in this struggle.
Commit to daily prospecting so you can avoid this altogether. Three hours of every day prospecting are enough to prevent the real estate rollercoaster.
Note that you’ll have to figure out how to time block when prospecting.
What is time blocking?
Time blocking refers to a time management strategy. It is basically dividing your day into time blocks. Each time block is dedicated to a particular task. This really helps because you plan and schedule each day in advance instead of having a chaotic mess of undefined to-do tasks. Your calendar is always filled with duties and responsibilities. It becomes harder to waste your time and your day. As a real estate agent it is easy to watch your day fly by and realize nothing constructive got accomplished.
Time blocking is essential for real estate agents because the more you prospect, the more your schedule gets filled up and squeezed. More calls mean more leads. More leads mean more potential clients and deals to handle. You’re going to attend more meetings and schedule more property showings.
Real estate agents that are doing high numbers and high volumes attribute their success to this rule. If you fail to focus on time blocking, your schedule will be chaotic, run you and ruin your day. You’ll not have time to prospect, which will lead to inconsistent income.
- Attack Hot Leads
As a new real estate agent, it might be hard winning your first few clients when you don’t have any experience. You might not be able to generate leads when you have no client testimonials to share. This is because you’ve yet to set up a strong data base.
The basic steps you may use to get leads include:
- Starting with the people you know: As a new real estate agent, you may naturally be inclined to work with people you already know from your community or people you’ve already connected with online. People you already know are more likely to trust your services as a real estate agent than strangers.
- Meet new people: Once you’ve reached out to people you already know, you can move on to meeting new people. Get creative and use various means to reach out to these people. Common strategies include attending industry events, asking for referrals from your network, and volunteering. While letting people know that you’re a real estate agent is top of the priorities, also focus on nurturing and growing relationships.
- Nurturing Relationships: Once you start prospecting and marketing your services, you’re going to get more leads. However, just because a few of them contact you and show interest in your services doesn’t mean that they will buy from you. You need to nurture and grow that personal connection with your clients. Remember, they are trusting you with a lot of money and lifetime decisions. Ways to keep connecting with them include frequent check-in, personalized messages and small gifts during special events such as birthdays and anniversaries. Also, if a deal fails to sail through, keep the clients in your network. You can engage them in another deal and end up closing.
Every lead is different.
However, you also need to realize that not all leads are equal. Some leads will be much more motivated and ready to close at a rapid rate than others.
For example, as a new real estate agent who’s goal is to make a commission as soon as possible, it would be prudent to focus on Expired and FSBO leads. These are people who have already raised their hands and identified themselves as people who want to sell a property.
Your job will be simply to go out and prove to them that you’re the person to help them do that and help them achieve their goal of selling their house and moving to a new location. If you can prove that, commission checks are going to come in fast.
The problem you will face as a new agent is that there’s a lot of experienced real estate agents going after these leads as well. Expired listings and For Sale By Owner leads are the low hanging fruit of the industry. This takes us back to building your skills. Spend a certain amount of time every day, prospecting and practicing. Also, dedicate a particular time of the day time block and focus on training, education and building your skills.
Conclusion
If you can focus on both of these things and combine them, you’ll have a remarkable career. When you’re not prospecting and practicing what you’ve learned, you’ll be learning more information. You’re testing what you’re learning in real life. This is how you go from an amateur agent to an experienced agent in a reasonable amount of time.