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What You Didn’t Learn in Real Estate School – The Realities of a Career in Real Estate

book-swsWelcome to the Wonderful World of Real Estate! If you’re fresh out of real estate school, you are about to begin a career that can lead you to fame and fortune…or sadly be an unfortunate blip on the radar screen of your professional life. Statistics quote figures that range from 70% to 95% dropout rate for first-year real estate agents and it’s common knowledge in the industry that only a small percentage of the licensed agents are making enough money to live on…selling real estate, that is.

If you get through your first year with your enthusiasm intact, you will have beaten the odds and stand an excellent chance of success. And success selling real estate is a beautiful thing. A career in real estate offers nearly unlimited potential for financial reward, an enviable lifestyle, and the opportunity to build an empire for your retirement or to pass on to your children. It can also guarantee you a captive audience at social gatherings, if that’s your thing.

So why is the failure rate so high? It’s not as if real estate is brain surgery; there are thousands of non-rocket-scientist real estate agents out there making plenty of money. It’s not a matter of supply and demand; there’s business out there, even in a slow market. Is it a matter of unrealistic expectations? Maybe. A lack of enthusiasm? Probably. A lack of support and training? Absolutely.

Funny, they don’t teach you how to sell real estate in real estate school. They teach you how to pass the state exam. If you passed the test, your real estate school did its job. Moreover, the training provided by Big Name real estate companies is often geared primarily toward teaching new agents to prospect, with little guidance on how to actually be a competent real estate agent.

But you may not be worried about that just yet, especially if you’re new.

Brand new real estate agents have an arrogance about them (we all did)—especially if we’d bought or sold a few homes of our own in our past life. We think we know it all and are ready to take the real estate world by storm. Get out of the way, hot-shot agent coming through! Then reality creeps in. Our ignorance starts to show.

Maybe it happens when you’re scheduling showings for your first buyer. Or when you’re sitting down to write your first offer. Perhaps, like me, you panicked when you got your first listing under contract and had no idea what to do then. Or, also like me, when you stayed up 48 hours straight trying to put together your first market analysis. Most likely, all these scenarios will happen to you and provide periodic reality checks to keep you humble.

Or, perhaps, drive you screaming (or whimpering) from the business.

As a professional real estate agent, you will be well paid for your services, and your clients expect you to be competent at your job, not just competent at prospecting. Your paying clients don’t care if you have ten listings or two, if you have five upcoming closings or none. They do care deeply that you understand the real estate market, that you’re a good negotiator and that you know how to look after them and their needs.

Are You Thinking About Going Into Real Estate?

Let us help you make the right decision for you. Click here to learn more and enroll in our free “So You Wanna Be a Real Estate Agent” newsletter mini-clinic course to learn more about what this career REALLY entails!

Selling with Soul for Rookie Real Estate Agents

If you’ve already perused other real estate training material, you may have noticed that we have a different philosophy here toward the proper care and training of ouSWS Rocksr rookies. We don’t believe that encouraging a “Fake it ’til You Make it” attitude is a nice way to treat people – not the new agent who is expecting to be trained and certainly not that new agent’s first clients!

Therefore, here in SWSLand, we focus on getting our rookie agents COMPETENT before we encourage them to pursue business. We believe that when a green bean agent has a reasonable level of understanding of what’s involved in managing a real estate transaction, she will be far more CONFIDENT in herself and her value…which will make her far more persuasive when she does hit the streets looking for her first clients.

How long before you’ll be “ready” to formally prospect for business? Well, that depends on YOU! If you commit yourself to learning your systems, your contracts and your market, and to understanding the moving pieces and parts of a real estate transaction, you can be ready for business within a month or so. And believe me, that month will fly by and you’ll be glad you waited.

How does this sound so far? Does the idea of delaying your business-building activities until you’re better prepared to handle that business appeal to you? Are you willing to invest a month or two into building your knowledge, your expertise and your competence? Do you want, with all your heart, to be, as we say around here – “The Best Thing to Happen to Your Clients?”

If your response is along the lines of “Eh, thanks, but no thanks. Not my style,” that’s perfectly fine. There are plenty of other real estate philosophies and trainers out there who will better suit you and we wish you all the best.

But if your answer is an enthusiastic “Heck, yeah! That sounds fantastic!” then… WELCOME! You are SO in the right place.

“Okay, I’m in! What’s next?!”

Neato Frito. Here’s where to go from here.

First, feel free to peruse all the free stuff for rookies here at SellwithSoul.com.

If you’re ready to spend a few dollars on getting knowledgeable and competent, just visit our store here. You’ll find all our products for rookies in the Products for Rookies category (clever, eh?). Below are our three most popular products purchased by new agents, but there’s much more at the Store!

And of course, we’re here for you. We’re real people who actually read and respond to the comments and questions we get from new SWS’ers (that’s what we call agents who follow Sell with Soul philosophies). Feel free to email Jennifer with any questions you may have and she’ll get back to you as soon as she can.

So, again, welcome to Selling with Soul. We’re thrilled to have you here.