12 Tips for New Realtors

You have decided to enter the real estate business and are now a new real estate professional agent. You had taken the requisite courses for education in the real estate industry and taken the tests and professional licensing real estate exam. With that precious real estate license in hand, you want to start preparing what to do to succeed in your real estate career. Below is a compilation of the most important tips to become a successful real estate agent. You can also learn more about different types of agents and their roles.

To-do Checklist for a New Real Estate Agent

As you're thinking of your preparations, among your thoughts would be the right tactics to be a successful real estate agent. In recent years, the real estate market has become fiercely competitive. The pandemic has exacerbated the situation of already low inventory before that. Low inventory, in real estate, means there are more people seeking to buy homes than available homes for sale.

You must be able to acquire and gather skills and usage of the necessary tools so you can develop expertise to be able to attract your target audience - potential clients or potential buyers as new clients and grow your new business. How much business new real estate agents can get as leads will depend on these. Tick off this real estate agent checklist as you start building your new business as a real estate professional.

☑ Engage with your family and friends

As a new agent and business owner, go and tell your family and friends. Better, even before you take the required tests and examinations. Most real estate professionals start their network with their friends and family members. Since it takes about a year to become a professional, it would be good for lead generation to have a network in place before you get your license. At the same time, selling or buying a home takes people a considerable amount of time. When they have finally decided to sell or buy a home, these future clients will be referred by your already established network to you!

☑ Consider joining a team - Find the right brokerage whose culture you can relate to

As an industry newbie, it might be a good idea to join a team, but don't just join the cheapest brokerage you know. The "right" brokerage is going to be critical - get onboard with one that has the people and culture with a work-life balance that feels right with you. Put in effort in your search and you're bound to find one with a solid reputation, one that's willing to spend time to support newbies, and long-term employees.

☑ Treat yourself like a business - Create a complete business plan and budget

As a real estate professional, you are also a business owner. Thus, you will need a business plan with an accompanying budget. As you draw up your plan, ask yourself - if it is going to be a full-time or part-time business, what your work hours will be, the listings you would want to have and manage, what your main venues for marketing will be, if you'll have a home office or join a brokerage firm, supplies, and equipment you would be needing. You can search for a template to create your business plan, and follow each indicated step for its development into a complete plan.

☑ Develop your branding, your mission, and your marketing

This is the most important part of your business plan. Know the market and create your brand, this is your identity. It sets you apart from other agents in the market. Your brand must be second nature to you. Your mission defines your marketing for lead gen and more leads in the market. You must stay focused on your brand and your mission because these will guide you in more effort you put into your marketing.

Your brand and your mission make prospective clients choose you to work with and not search for someone else from different firms. These define what you are focused on - whether it's a new home for a family or young professional or condominiums or apartments/townhouses, or waterfront and luxury properties.

When you meet with a new buyer or a broker for the first time, you must be able to describe yourself and your brand in just a couple of sentences. That is why this is among the first important things you have to do. Ask yourself if you are really committed to making this your profession, your career. You must know your story because that is your "face" to present to the clients.

☑ Build your network: connect with people in your community

Another important item on your new real estate agent checklist - is a network. Reach out to your neighborhood or community. New agents must always secure leads. Have your own business cards made and give these out to every new person, informing them you are a Realtor. People will then usually ask and when they do, discuss the real estate topics you are most certain about. Give a fair amount of effort to set up your reputation among the people within the industry and outside.

☑ Create a website: Get on social media - Make your calls

Some time before the turn of the century, people turned to the internet for information and research more than to encyclopedias and physical libraries. Before asking family and friends, people search online for a realtor in their area. Having a website gives you accessibility to potential buyers and sellers and vice versa. The same is true for social media accounts. Setting up and keeping a website plus one or two social media accounts allows you to draw in prospects and future clients with minimal effort from your side. These days, every professional, even in real estate, has a website. With the traffic drawn to your site, your stature will grow in time.

☑ Invest in paid lead generation

One way of boosting one's business for a new agent is paid lead generation. A lead is a person showing interest in the company and its "products" but is not yet qualified or ready to purchase. Lead generation is a process done for getting potential customers to generate future sales. Lead generation is an essential part of the sales process.

Paid lead generation will target a potential buyer or someone who has shown interest in a listing and is looking for a Realtor to represent him/her. Some leads would also generate the interest of one selling a property. You will need to pay a retainer fee to have the lead gen website to continuously refer prospective clients (i.e., leads) to you. Some have pay-per-lead payment arrangements.

You can find lead generation businesses online, just go over the reviews to help you choose which would be worth the money you will spend.

☑ Set up and maintain linkages with other real estate agents

Connect with other realtors and real estate agents, they will be a fount of advice, connections, and. valuable resources! They could also send business your way eventually. Other agents are not your competitors, not directly, no. Other agents can be your mentors. Having a mentor to work with is going to help you towards success, you'll know what you don't know.

Eventually, like any professional, they will retire (or move to another location or state) and before that, they could be a valuable source for your client base. Networking is as good as buying ads and getting listings, for expansion and marketing success. For better guidance in real estate industry, get in touch with Barry Jenkins - Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate | Real Estate Agency in Virginia Beach, VA.

☑ Invest in software - Project management and scheduling

You are not just a professional person, you are a business. You would need your schedules and processes handled properly, and systematically, for whatever projects you have acquired to succeed. You need the appropriate systems to organize, improve and optimize the running of your business. For example, you wouldn't be able to keep track of all bookings or listings. Start with a checklist for your real estate listing, to get all the data you would need to post a listing and manage it. You will need to monitor several things, like when your showings are. With good scheduling and systems, you will be missing things less and that's more chances of you closing a sale.

☑ Automate as much of your process as possible

Investing in technology, like project management software, is one of the surest paths to easier, more convenient, and actually simpler management of diverse and various listings and clients. The objective of any real estate transaction is a speedy close, as fast as possible. Because the quicker the closing is, the less the chances are for any issues to arise.

You can do your operations more smoothly with technology, making contracts, closing documents, or even listing agreements. You can set up a system to have your listing appointment and other scheduling tasks machine/computer-generated. You can track and measure everything in your business. The more of your jobs you automate, the more income you are likely to produce in this market.

☑ Create scripts for client communication

Communication is essential in any sales business, including the real estate industry. You will be doing written, electronic and verbal communication - which has nonverbal aspects as well, like your tone of voice and your facial expressions and gestures. These could be formal and non-formal communications. Consider these various stages in real estate transactions - Your first meeting with a potential homebuyer, your presentation of a client's listings, your negotiation or search for a home appraisal or inspection, your matching of a client with a mortgage broker, your reconnection with a previous client, etc.

Communication in any or all of these stages can be spontaneous if you are good at extemporaneous speech making/performing. However, even extemporaneous speeches are backed by even at least an outline, lest an important point is omitted or forgotten. That is the same in real estate. You can create scripts for all your communications, from an outline to a bulleted list of all the main points you would want to bring up, to a detailed script. You can make templates of email scripts for different aspects of your job, and the various stages of the transaction where you will need these communications. In this way, you will be able to save time from having to create a new email each time.

☑ Devote time, money, and effort to continuous education and new learning

On your way to growing and evolving into a successful real estate professional, you need to be learning and re-learning, always, all the time. Having your license renewed regularly requires continued education. In fact, each state has a stipulated number of credit hours and courses of continuing education for license renewal. For additional read, learn more about Real Estate License: Is It for Me?

But license renewal is not your only reason for ongoing learning and education, a lot more reasons call for it. Marketing, networking, social media development, the market situation, and how it is growing. The real estate market is cyclical, tending towards a wave pattern of four phases, recovery, expansion, hyper supply, and recession. You must know the trends as well. There was a time when townhomes were the most popular residential properties, then single-family properties, when it is a buyers' market,  when it is a sellers' market, and so on. There would always be new developments that you must be aware of, to be able to guide your client appropriately.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What do most realtors make during their first year?

  From a job sourcing website, a realtor's average salary in the first year of full-time work is only a bit more than $83,000, with some variations, though. A report in the past year shows that a good number of agents' starting salary is significantly lower but after their first year it increases sharply, even gets doubled.

• What skills does a real estate agent need to succeed?

  The real estate industry is a highly personal one. People skills are invaluable and useful and effective. Realtors and real estate agents must relate to and associate with people, and be able to perceive who are potential clients, as buyers or sellers. A self-motivated highly people person an agent is, the more chances s/he will make it big in the real estate business. In a nutshell, s/he will need skills in communication, motivation, intuition, and knowledge.

• Why do most new realtors fail?

  The majority of new realtors and real estate professionals fail because they had underestimated the magnitude of work needed to set a real estate career in motion and got overwhelmed.

  It is not difficult to become an agent, but it is far from easy to develop into a successful agent! It is wrong to assume the road towards getting to be a real estate professional is easy.

• Is being a real estate agent worth it?

  One of the benefits often ignored or not given that much significance is the reward of achievement - real estate agents have the means and the power for people to fulfill their dreams. Owning one's home is everyone's (or almost everyone's) dream. Or to sell one's home and move to a bigger one. In their job, realtors get the optimum price possible for their clients, whether sellers or buyers by guiding and assisting them in the processes of the transaction. It is such a wonderful feeling, exhilarating even, to know that you had brought about the realization of their lifelong dream. That is a benefit, nay, a reward that is worth much more than monetary gain.

• What is paid lead generation?

  Lead generation is creating interest in a company - its brand, products, or services through outbound and inbound marketing strategies, among which are email marketing and online advertising. Paid lead generation is paying a person or a company to do those mentioned tasks. Lead generation, aka lead gen, is an indispensable process for B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) companies.

• What kind of technology is needed for real estate agents?

  Among the latest software technology, Blockchain, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are showing potential significance for the real estate markets. This industry has always been contingent on technological developments and recent years have held major breakthroughs.